YMMV and you do need to change your habits a bit, which is anathema to the HN crowd.

"It can't run my custom i3wm setup and doom-emacs and I can't even cargo install stuff on it, completely unusable!"

I could, and have, done my work just with an iPad and an external keyboard. Blink shell[0] to SSH into a remote environment. VS Code or a similar browser-based editor for code[1].

Of course a full 16" laptop would be better, but before the M1 the battery life was nothing near what the iPad could bring.

[0] https://blink.sh [1] https://vscode.dev